The season just drawing to a close deserves to be remembered as one of the best in the Premier League era, with the title race reaching an exciting conclusion, several clubs still interested in what is turning out to be an absorbing struggle for fourth place, and a high level of incident and entertainment throughout.

Perhaps the standard of football has not been the best ever but you cannot have it both ways. When we used to have two-horse races between clubs that set such impossibly high standards no one else could reach them and most other contenders were out of contention by the turn of the year, people would say it was boring, or just like being in Scotland. Ditto all the years when the top four was set in stone, only without the Scotland bit.

This season has certainly not been boring. If it has been bumpy at times it has also been exhilarating, like a fairground ride. Arsenal only gave up on the title a couple of weeks ago with that wholly unexpected defeat at Wigan, and while Liverpool say they have not yet given up hope of finishing fourth they at present lie seventh, not completely certain of finishing above Everton.

It would be wrong, however, to suggest every issue has gone right to the wire, that every contest has maintained interest until the end, because the bottom end of the table tells a very different story. There, three teams are already relegated (with respect to Hull's microscopic mathematical chance of beating Wigan and Liverpool by more than 20 goals) and they are the teams that people have been saying would go down for a very long time.

Certainly supporters of the three Ws – West Ham, Wigan, and Wolves – have been comforting themselves for months with the reassuring notion that the bottom three was unlikely to change, and that is how it turned out. Bolton too have had an extremely average season but have been insulated against over-anxiety by the knowledge that at least three teams below them were performing far worse.

Quite often in past seasons the relegation issues have provided most of the last-day drama, though not this time. Just looking at the points totals alone, without considering some of the desperately disappointing performances, it can be seen that any one of the bottom seven might have been relegated in a normal season. It will be a major surprise if anyone below Stoke City reaches 40 points by the end of the campaign. Not that there is any need to now. The three to go down are the ones everyone predicted almost from the start.

Portsmouth were always bound to struggle, with their crippling financial problems and player exodus, and as soon as administration became inevitable their fate was sealed. Burnley were always going to struggle too, and were struggling, despite a bright start, even before Owen Coyle left for Bolton. It will never be known for certain what might have been achieved had Coyle remained at Turf Moor – it does not seem too far-fetched to suppose he could have supervised a couple more victories and at least made Wigan or West Ham sweat a little more – though to outsiders at least it appears Burnley were always expecting their stay in the Premier League to be a short one. That may have been what persuaded Coyle he would not be able to take the club any further in the first place, and Brian Laws never had a remote chance of doing any better. From the moment Burnley switched managers they were goners. There was never any suggestion of a fightback.

The same could be said of Hull, except by the time they switched Phil Brown for Iain Dowie they were practically goners already. As their chairman frankly admitted at the weekend, Hull have been displaying relegation form for the last 18 months. Since Christmas last season they have won a mere seven matches. If that seems to echo George Boateng's pathetic excuse in blaming Brown's infamous half-time team-talk on the Manchester City pitch for all the rubbish that has served up since, it is not meant to. Brown himself was desperate on Boxing Day 2008. His team had won just once in 10 matches and now they were 4-0 down at half-time. His ploy may have backfired and may not have been all that well thought out in the first place, but it was a symptom of Hull's struggle, not the cause.

The simple fact is that but for that blissful period at the start of last season when Hull gaily gathered the scalps of Arsenal, Tottenham, Newcastle and West Ham, amongst others, in a blistering start that brought them 20 points from their opening nine games, they would have been back in the Championship last May. Without anything like the same start this season, and without any detectable improvement in form, they never stood a chance, in fact it does not say much for the teams immediately above them that Hull lasted until late April before their relegation was effectively confirmed.

The predictability of the bottom three meant this season's Premier League was forgiving enough to allow teams in the bottom half of the table to get away with some fairly hefty mistakes. Bolton, in the end, did not have to pay a high price for putting their faith in Gary Megson. Gianfranco Zola appears likely to be a personal casualty of West Ham's change of ownership, yet at least the Italian's misjudgments in the transfer market did not incur the additional financial penalty of relegation. Wolves' Mick McCarthy is now being praised in some quarters for his wholesale changes and craven surrender at Old Trafford, which is wrong on two counts.

First, rotation is not the same at the bottom of the league as it is at the top. Leading teams can make changes and still put out a competitive side, and even then they don't usually change all 10 outfield players. Wolves lack that strength in depth, and what McCarthy did at Old Trafford amounted to surrender, which is not what 73,000 people paid to see. Second, you could just about justify McCarthy's policy if the subsequent win against Burnley had kept Wolves up. It didn't. Just about everybody beat Burnley in the end. Wolves are safe by virtue of the presence of three weak teams below them, not by any clever strategies of their own.

The same is true of Wigan, who in an infuriatingly inconsistent season managed to beat Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea for the first time yet were hopeless against the weaker teams and lost 10-0 on aggregate to Manchester United and 12-1 to Spurs. The jury is still deliberating its verdict on Roberto Martínez as a Premier League manager, because everyone, including ESPN, expected Wigan v Hull on Monday to be a fight for survival rather than the most uninteresting game ever shown live on television. Wigan have survived, but can Martínez take the credit, after losing at home to Wolves, away to Pompey, and only beating Burnley at the DW Stadium with a goal in the last minute?

Next season should be a much sterner test. Newcastle and West Brom are up and, while they may not find the going easy, it will be a surprise if they disappear back into the Championship as meekly as Burnley or limp along as slowly as Hull. The bottom three should not be nailed on from the start, and some of this season's survivors – Bolton and the three Ws – will have to do better. So one hopes, anyway.

The normal, agreed, number of points for survival is 40, though it can go up or down in different seasons. The table at the moment indicates that not one but four teams have survived with points totals in the low to mid-thirties (those totals may rise by the end of the season yet the urgency has now gone from remaining games). A total of 38 points is an average of one point per game, which does not mean you have had a great season but in most seasons ought to give you a fighting chance of avoiding relegation. Sometimes you can go down with 38, sometimes it is enough to stay up, but it is unusual for more than one club to stay up with 38, two at the outside.

It will be interesting to see how many of the present bottom seven reach 38 by the end of the season. The bottom three cannot, obviously, though not all the teams above them will manage it either. It will not say a lot for the league as a whole, and certainly not the watchability of football at the bottom end, if a quarter or more of its teams are bumping along on less than a point a game.